With the emergence of the Internet, organizations are identifying opportunities to extend their core business or cut costs using the Internet. This trend has put increasing priority on integrating disparate application programs within a single organization as well as within different organizations. For this reason, enterprise application integration has become increasingly important to allow organizations to build bridges between various application programs.
Web services have emerged as key solutions for enterprise application integration. Existing Web services can facilitate exchange of data between various organizations. In some instances, existing Web services can detect error conditions during processing of data and can notify an organization of such error conditions. However, existing Web services typically only notify owners of the Web service, while organizations that use the Web service are not notified. Accordingly, organizations that use the Web service may be unaware of error conditions that can adversely impact their business. In addition, existing Web services sometimes fail to identify a processing stage at which an error condition occurs. Thus, an organization that is notified of the error condition may have difficulty pinpointing the source of the problem.
It is against this background that a need arose to develop the apparatus and method described herein.